Category: Fraud

It’s pretty amazing how our media elite was able to stop so quickly pretending that we were all going to be doomed by this bat soup virus unless we cowered in our homes when it became useful for people to be out supporting the Democrat agenda of violence and tyranny.

Everytown for Gun Safety produced an “analysis” that sought to tie an “‘alarming’ spike” in fatal firearms-related accidents involving children to the recent surge in firearms purchases across the country. Their point is predicated on the deliberate exclusion and misuse of their own data – they used the tragic deaths of children to push their anti-gun agenda. Their own historical data disproves their claim.

Shannon Watts spoke to CBS News about this analysis and said: “‘We know that there are risks to having guns in the home, and with the surge in gun sales in the last two months, it could create more opportunity for kids to gain access to guns and unintentionally hurt themselves or someone else,’ said Shannon Watts, founder of Everytown’s anti-gun violence volunteer network Moms Demand Action. ‘The numbers show there’s been an increase in these horrible shooting tragedies during the time the pandemic was at its peak.’”

Watts and Bloomberg must be desperate to spin the recent increase in gun sales into a negative. The Everytown research division put together this analysis by comparing the number of fatal accidents involving children and teens (up to age 17) as either the victim or the accidental perpetrator in March and April 2020 to the average number of children and teens involved in fatal firearms-related accidents in the same months for 2017 through 2019. They say that there were 21 such deaths in March and April 2020, and that the average number of such deaths in the same months for 2017 through 2019 is 15.

Watts wants you to think that those additional deaths should be attributed to the increase in gun sales because the 2020 total is higher than the average for the previous three years.

Every accidental death of a child is a tragedy, no matter the means, but Everytown is using these tragedies (and some misinformation) to further their political agenda.

The truth is within the data that Everytown scraped (on which their analysis is based). There were, according to Everytown’s data, 21 deaths resulting from a firearms-related accident involving children or teens. The average for March-April over the last three years is, in fact, 15. Why use an average, and why use three years of data when five is available? Let’s look at the annual totals for March-April, according to Everytown’s data:

Sadly, the 21 fatalities in 2020 is not the peak for the March-April period according to Everytown’s data. It is tied for second with the year 2016. Everytown focuses on averages to avoid the year-to-year comparison that shows that the 21 fatal accidents in 2020 is similar to – and even lower than – other years in their own data. The time period used for their average was deliberately chosen because it gives the smallest average possible. The victims of these tragic accidents from 2015 through 2020 range in age from 1 to 28 years old, with the age of one victim unknown to Everytown.

Everytown’s deliberate misrepresentation of their own data is disgusting. These are people – including young children – who lost their lives in tragic ways. Everytown is treating them as a means to an end.

No one wants children to be hurt or killed. The NRA developed the Eddie Eagle program to teach kids to stop, don’t touch, run away, and tell a grown-up if they come across a firearm. More than 30 million children have participated in this program since 1988. The firearms industry trade group NSSF developed Project Child Safe in 1999 and has distributed more than 38 million cable locks and safety kits to gun owners.

Everything with Shannon Watts and Everytown comes back to their desire to strip away the gun rights of law-abiding Americans. Why else make a baseless and inaccurate claim that is obviously designed to score political points by pulling emotional levers?

These children and teens deserve better than to be weaponized by Shannon Watts and Everytown.

Gun control activists have found a new target to go after: 3-D printed guns.

Why? It’s an easy scapegoat to lay blame on, just like every proposed gun control policy mulled before Congress and state legislatures.

This effort is attributed to two things: the reintroduction of Senator Richard Blumenthal’s (D-CT) “Untraceable Firearms Act,” and a recent ‘60 Minutes’ CBS report claiming criminals overwhelmingly prefer them when committing crimes. The former, if passed, would ban the manufacture and sale of “ghost guns.”

Giffords, a gun control organization operated by former Congresswoman Gabby Giffords (D-AZ), just launched a campaign against these firearms. Unsurprisingly, the organization and its senior policy advisor, David Chipman, are spreading misinformation about them.

In a recent blog post titled Ghost Guns Are Specifically Designed for Criminals, the retired Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) special agent claimed, “These days, we’re seeing an alarming new trend among criminals and firearm traffickers: ghost guns. Not enough people are talking about this growing threat, and that’s got to change.”

He added,“Why do criminals love ghost guns? That’s a no-brainer. It makes their jobs easier.”

Congressional Democrats, Giffords, and ‘60 Minutes’ are intentionally deceiving the public about 3-D guns. Let’s explore the facts about them and their alleged primary use in gun crimes.

No Evidence 3-D Guns Predominantly Used in Crime

While “ghost guns” were recently trafficked and used in last year’s Saugus school shooting, there’s no evidence suggesting they’re a criminal’s to-go gun.

For example, a January 2019 survey from the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) found criminals didn’t readily use “ghost guns” in perpetrated crimes. The survey, Source And Use Of Firearms Involved In Crimes: Survey Of Prison Inmates, 2016, concluded of the 287,400 prisoners surveyed who possessed guns during their offense 56 percent had stolen them, 6 percent had found the firearms at the scene of the crime, 43 percent obtained it from the black market or illegal means while 25 percent were gifted the guns by family members or friends. A mere 7 percent of respondents surveyed had purchased guns from federal firearms license dealers (FFL).

According to a 2016 Chicago Inmate Survey of Gun Access and Use (CIS) from University of Chicago Crime Lab, Windy City criminals primarily obtained firearms from strangers (34.4%), theft (31.7%), friends/family (26.7%), gangs (22.6%), straw purchases (20.8%), and on the street (19.7%).

Bill Whitaker: How many of these guns are on the streets, you have no idea?

Thomas Chittum: Uh, no, I have no idea.

Bill Whitaker: And how many crimes are being committed by these guns, you have no idea?

Thomas Chittum: Well, not with precision. They still represent a minority of the firearms that are being used in crimes. But we do see that they’re increasing significantly and rapidly.

3D Printed Guns are Already Highly-Regulated

‘60 Minutes’ also claimed, “…federal gun law only regulates a part, called a frame or a lower receiver.”

That’s simply incorrect.

In order to manufacture and sell these custom built firearms, one must obtain a special license from the ATF. Their website states, “Any person “engaged in the business” as a manufacturer must obtain a license from ATF.”

Washington Free Beacon’s Stephen Gutowski tweeted this in response to the CBS report, “To be clear, it is currently not legal for prohibited persons (like convicted felons) to build their own firearms. Nor is it legal to sell guns you’ve manufactured yourself unless you have a license. It is legal for the law-abiding people to build their own guns for personal use.”

Law-Abiding Americans Have Been Building Guns Since USA’s Inception

The concept of custom-building firearms, most recently with popular semi-automatic Armalite Rifles (AR-15s), isn’t new. In fact, people have been designing and modifying firearms for personal use essentially since our nation’s inception.

Per ATF rules, “An individual may generally make a firearm for personal use.”

Criminals using “ghost guns” in crimes are generally prohibited possessors who shouldn’t be in possession of them in the first place. How does regulating these firearms in question, which already have strident restrictions placed on them, any further deter criminals? It won’t.

3-D Printed Technology is Expensive and Not Easy to Acquire

It’s very hard for individuals—let alone criminals—to obtain 3-D printed guns. They don’t come cheap nor are they easy to procure and possess.

In an op-ed for 3DPrint.com, a self-described leading authority on 3-D printed technology, Scott J. Gruenald wrote, “…making a 3D printed gun is not easy, it is not quick, it is not cheap and it does not result in especially dangerous or deadly weapons. Not only is it cheaper to just buy a real gun in the United States, but it is also probably a lot faster to go buy one, even with any state-mandated waiting periods.”

Conclusion

Criminals will use whatever tool is at their disposal—be it a 3-D printed AR-15, handgun, or knife—to inflict pain onto their victims. Unfortunately for gun controllers, none of their beloved laws or bills have deterred criminals from committing ghastly acts. In fact, they have invited more crime.

It’s time for our opponents finally to get serious about tackling criminal misuse of firearms, not scapegoat 3D printed firearms.

Americans expect that politicians will lie, but sometimes the examples are so brazen that they deserve special notice. Newly released Congressional testimony shows that Adam Schiff spread falsehoods shamelessly about Russia and Donald Trump for three years even as his own committee gathered contrary evidence.

The House Intelligence Committee last week released 57 transcripts of interviews it conducted in its investigation into Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election. The committee probe started in January 2017 under then-Chair Devin Nunes and concluded in March 2018 with a report finding no evidence that the Trump campaign conspired with the Kremlin. Most of the transcripts were ready for release long ago, but Mr. Schiff oddly refused to release them after he became chairman in 2019. He only released them last week when the White House threatened to do it first.
Now we know why. From the earliest days of the collusion narrative, Mr. Schiff insisted that he had evidence proving the plot. In March 2017 on MSNBC, Mr. Schiff teased that he couldn’t “go into particulars, but there is more than circumstantial evidence now.”

In December 2017 he told CNN that collusion was a fact: “The Russians offered help, the campaign accepted help. The Russians gave help and the President made full use of that help.” In April 2018, Mr. Schiff released his response to Mr. Nunes’s report, stating that its finding of no collusion “was unsupported by the facts and the investigative record.”

None of this was true, and Mr. Schiff knew it. In July 2017, here’s what former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper told Mr. Schiff and his colleagues: “I never saw any direct empirical evidence that the Trump campaign or someone in it was plotting/conspiring with the Russians to meddle with the election.” Three months later, former Obama Attorney General Loretta Lynch agreed that while she’d seen “concerning” information, “I don’t recall anything being briefed up to me.” Former Deputy AG Sally Yates concurred several weeks later: “We were at the fact-gathering stage here, not the conclusion stage.”

The same goes for the FBI agents who started the collusion probe in 2016. Most remarkable, former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe admitted the bureau’s reason for opening the case was nonsense. Asked in December 2017 why the FBI obtained a secret surveillance warrant on former Trump aide Carter Page, rather than on George Papadopoulos (whose casual conversation with a foreign diplomat was the catalyst for the probe), Mr. McCabe responded: “Papadopoulos’ comment didn’t particularly indicate that he was the person that had had—that was interacting with the Russians.” No one else was either.

On it went, a parade of former Obama officials who declared under oath they’d seen no evidence of collusion or conspiracy—Susan Rice, Ben Rhodes, Samantha Power. Interviews with Trump campaign or Administration officials also yielded no collusion evidence. Mr. Schiff had access to these transcripts even as he claimed he had “ample” proof of collusion and wrote his false report.

He’s still making it up. Last week he said the transcripts contain “evidence of the Trump campaign’s efforts to invite, make use of, and cover up Russia’s help in the 2016 presidential election.”
The question we’d ask our friends in the media is when are they going to stop playing the fool by putting him on the air? Mr. Schiff is a powerful figure with access to secrets that the rest of us don’t have and can’t check. He misled the country repeatedly on an issue that consumed American politics.

President Trump often spreads falsehoods and invents facts, but at least he’s paid a price for it in media criticism and public mistrust. An industry of media fact checkers is dedicated to parsing his every word. As for Mr. Schiff, no one should ever believe another word he says.

U.S.A. – -(Ammoland.com)- “Four people were killed and 41 others were wounded in shootings across Chicago so far over the first weekend of May,” Sun-Times Media Wire reported Monday. “Twenty-one of the weekend’s victims were shot in a seven-hour period from Saturday night to Sunday morning, including five teenagers wounded in a drive-by in Lawndale on the West Side.”

“As Chicago struggles to treat the flood of COVID-19 patients, a surge in gun violence continues to disproportionately affect the city’s most vulnerable communities and further puts a strain on the city’s resources,” Mother Jones complains. “[G]un violence is surging in several major cities—including Cincinnati, Philadelphia, and Dallas—and many of those cities’ resources to address the issue are dwindling.”

Several levels of fraud are being perpetrated here, which isn’t surprising, considering the source. The most obvious is the use of the pejorative term “gun violence,” meant to transfer blame from human actors to inanimate tools. Firearms aren’t the issue, nor are people having access to firearms. If they were, we’d be reading about daily bloodbaths perpetrated by members of the National Rifle Association, who number five million strong and are arguably the most heavily armed civilian population on the planet. When was the last time you read about an NRA member committing a “gun crime,” a hold-up, a drive-by or a rampage? Is there any doubt such an event would be headline news, played for all it’s worth, and shoved in gun owners’ faces at every opportunity?

So perhaps the issue is the “wrong” people having access to firearms? If you advocated racist policies, like Everytown and Demanding Moms bankroller Michael Bloomberg, you’d be pointing to the numbers for “male, minority and between the ages of 15 and 25,” and using that as an excuse to disarm them all, regardless of who they are as individuals endowed with certain unalienable rights. It disregards the racist roots of gun control and the strides for freedom made by leaders of groups like Deacons for Defense and Justice and undermines the needed messages from important contemporary voices.

Still, there’s no arguing which communities the problems with violence are coming from. The anti-violence groups themselves admit as much, as does the Giffords group and a coalition of mayors petitioning Congressional leaders for more money. While they claim to be all about “violence interruption and targeted outreach,” it’s inescapable that every signatory to the letter is a rabid gun-grabber and a Democrat.

So while Giffords’ executive director Peter Ambler offers pandering weasel words like “In the midst of a difficult situation, violence interrupters and street outreach workers are providing hope and lifelines to communities who need it,” never doubt for a moment that his goal is citizen disarmament, and the goal of the mayors is a monopoly of violence. What such urban wealth redistribution programs really do is keep a handful of manageable voices parroting a narrative that the problem is with guns. They make it look like the “political leaders” are “doing something,” helping them retain and grow their power.

Having Congress provide more money for that will only make everything worse. That means more people will die. With “progressives,” every day is Opposite Day.
Think about what it would really take to “end urban violence” using guns – especially since those committing the acts of violence invariably are already breaking every “gun law” in the books, starting with having them in the first place. It would take nothing short of the complete elimination of all guns outside of “authorized” possessors to achieve the goal, and that’s clearly not going to happen – first because there aren’t enough enforcers to kill all of us who will not disarm, and also because anyone trying to do so legislatively would see the same “success” as the so-called “war on drugs.”

No doubt the ones who would profit the most would be cartels, which would add a whole new turf war dynamic.

The truth about urban “gun violence” is it’s not about guns, but about “progressive” fraud that keeps charlatans in power through a seemingly endless cycle of dependency and manipulation. True, race is a factor—not as a cause of violent crime, but as an indicator of populations most influenced and thus victimized by a continuing history of destructive collectivist controls over the economy, over education, and over the lives of those trapped in a corrupt system.

You have to have a gubbermint issued ID to do almost everything in the U.S. Open a bank account, apply for a job, drive a car, buy a gun, board a plane. And why, we ask, is the demoncrap’s only schreech about having an ID is about voting.
Of course we know the reason why;Verifying one’s identity helps stop voter fraud.

FRANKFORT, Ky. (AP) — Republican lawmakers in Kentucky swept aside the Democratic governor’s veto of a bill to require the state’s residents to show a government-issued photo ID in order to vote.

Votes to override Gov. Andy Beshear’s veto easily cleared the GOP-led Senate and House as lawmakers reconvened Tuesday for a wrap-up session amid the coronavirus outbreak.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Kentucky promptly said it will consider filing legal action to try to halt the measure.

The measure would require Kentucky residents to produce a photo ID when voting, with limited exceptions, starting with the November election.

The bill’s supporters have noted that a photo ID already is required for many other transactions, including opening a bank account, cashing a check or picking up sports tickets at will-call.

Republican Sen. Robby Mills, the bill’s lead sponsor, said Tuesday that it would add “guardrails in our voting procedures that will help cure vulnerabilities that exist.”

The bill’s opponents pointed to the absence of voter impersonation cases in Kentucky. They said the photo ID requirement will reduce turnout among minorities, the poor, the elderly and disabled voters. Currently, Kentucky voters are asked to show identification but it doesn’t have to be a photo ID.

In trying to block the measure, the governor said it would create an obstacle to voting, resulting in fewer people casting ballots and “undermining our democracy.”

In his recent veto message, Beshear also objected to the bill’s timing, coming in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic. The offices where people could obtain a photo ID needed to vote are currently closed and it’s uncertain when they will reopen, the governor said.

Mills discounted that argument Tuesday during the Senate debate to override the veto.

“I am sure that we will have those clerks’ offices open and doing business later in the spring or summer,” he said. “And there’s going to be ample opportunities for folks that do not have a valid photo ID to obtain that free photo ID that is allowed in this piece of legislation.”

The bill’s leading supporters include Kentucky’s new Republican secretary of state, Michael Adams, who campaigned on the issue en route to his election victory last year.

Under the measure, people lacking their photo ID at the polls could vote by provisional ballot and later produce that ID to enable their ballot to be counted. Or voters could cast their ballots if recognized by an election officer, who would have to sign a document affirming to knowing the voter.

ACLU of Kentucky legal director Corey Shapiro denounced the proposal Tuesday as a “voter suppression measure in the name of election security.” He also expressed concern about the bill’s “rushed timeline,” coming months before a hotly contested general election.

“We are currently evaluating whether to seek court intervention to make sure every eligible voter can still cast a ballot under this oppressive measure,” he said in a statement.

In November, Kentuckians will vote for a president and decide one of the nation’s highest-profile campaigns: Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s bid for reelection.

{“The Democrats were bigger meddlers in the 2016 election than the Russians were.
The DNC and Hillary Clinton tampered with a Presidential election when the debate questions were provided to Hillary in advance of the National Presidential Debate, by CNN employee and former chair of the DNC, Donna Brazile. Trump still won the debate.

Conspiring to produce a hoax dossier with the deliberate intention of smearing Donald Trump by linking him with Russia to imply collusion.

The Obama administration used the Secret Service to arrange a meeting between former President Bill Clinton (his plane) and AG Loretta Lynch (her plane) on a isolated part of the tarmac at the airport in Phoenix, Arizona.
Just nine days later, after a year-long investigation, FBI Director James Comey suddenly announced that Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton would not be facing any charges for illegally sending classified information over an illegal and unauthorized server.

In a striking and unexpected abandonment of a once-heralded prosecution initiated by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, the Justice Department moved Monday to drop charges against two Russian companies that were accused of funding a social media meme campaign to further their “strategic goal to sow discord in the U.S. political system, including the 2016 presidential election.”

Late Monday, with jury selection in the case set to begin in just two weeks, a federal judge granted the DOJ’s motion to kill the prosecution. The government acknowledged the Russian companies were never likely to actually face punishment anyway and cited possible national security risks with going forward to trial.

Concord Management and Consulting LLC and Concord Catering were among three companies and 13 individuals charged in February 2018 by Mueller. Their alleged criminal effort included social media postings and campaigns aimed at dividing American public opinion and sowing discord in the electorate, officials said, although no actual impact on voters was ever proven.

Of the 13 Russians and three Russian companies charged by Mueller in the social media disinformation effort, Concord was the sole defendant to enter an appearance in Washington’s federal court and contest and the allegations. Mueller’s 37-page indictment said the actions detailed by prosecutors dated back to 2014. (Mueller later brought separate charges against other entities related to a hack of Democrats’ emails in the summer of 2018.)

President Trump noted that no Russian collusion with his campaign was ever proven, and Republicans and even left-of-center commenators argued that Russian disinformation was mostly irrelevant, given that social media and other platforms are already rife with inaccuracies.

“Before a pandemic, there was a time when we were relentlessly told to fear Russian social media accounts,” mused journalist Aaron Mate on Monday. “Their juvenile memes not only elected Trump, but also ‘sowed chaos.’ When Mueller indicted 13 Russians over it, he was hailed as a hero. Well, DOJ just dropped the case.”

WASHINGTON, D.C. – On the fourth floor of the Museum of the Bible, a sweeping permanent exhibit tells the story of how the ancient scripture became the world’s most popular book. A warmly lit sanctum at the exhibit’s heart reveals some of the museum’s most prized possessions: fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls, ancient texts that include the oldest known surviving copies of the Hebrew Bible.

But now, the Washington, D.C. museum has confirmed a bitter truth about the fragments’ authenticity. On Friday, independent researchers funded by the Museum of the Bible announced that all 16 of the museum’s Dead Sea Scroll fragments are modern forgeries that duped outside collectors, the museum’s founder, and some of the world’s leading biblical scholars. Officials unveiled the findings at an academic conference hosted by the museum.

“The Museum of the Bible is trying to be as transparent as possible,” says CEO Harry Hargrave. “We’re victims—we’re victims of misrepresentation, we’re victims of fraud.”

In a report spanning more than 200 pages, a team of researchers led by art fraud investigator Colette Loll found that while the pieces are probably made of ancient leather, they were inked in modern times and modified to resemble real Dead Sea Scrolls. “These fragments were manipulated with the intent to deceive,” Loll says.

The new findings don’t cast doubt on the 100,000 real Dead Sea Scroll fragments, most of which lie in the Shrine of the Book, part of the Israel Museum, Jerusalem. However, the report’s findings raise grave questions about the “post-2002” Dead Sea Scroll fragments, a group of some 70 snippets of biblical text that entered the antiquities market in the 2000s. Even before the new report, some scholars believed that most to all of the post-2002 fragments were modern fakes.

“Once one or two of the fragments were fake, you know all of them probably are, because they come from the same sources, and they look basically the same,” says Årstein Justnes, a researcher at Norway’s University of Agder whose Lying Pen of Scribes project tracks the post-2002 fragments.
Since its 2017 opening, the Museum of the Bible has funded research into the pieces and sent off five fragments to Germany’s Federal Institute for Materials Research for testing. In late 2018, the museum announced the results to the world: All five tested fragments were probably modern forgeries.

But what of the other 11 fragments? And how had the forgers managed to fool the world’s leading Dead Sea Scroll scholars and the Museum of the Bible?

“It really was—and still is—an interesting kind of detective story,” says Jeffrey Kloha, the Museum of the Bible’s chief curatorial officer. “We really hope this is helpful to other institutions and researchers, because we think this provides a good foundation for looking at other pieces, even if it raises other questions.”

Under the microscope

To find out more about its fragments, the Museum of the Bible reached out to Loll and her company, Art Fraud Insights, in February 2019 and charged her with conducting a thorough physical and chemical investigation of all 16 pieces. Loll was no stranger to fakes and forgeries. After getting her master’s in art history at George Washington University, Loll went on to study international art crime, run forgery investigations, and train federal agents on matters of cultural heritage.

Loll insisted on independence. Not only would the Museum of the Bible have no say on the team’s findings, her report would be final—and would have to be released to the public. The Museum of the Bible agreed to the terms. “Honestly, I’ve never worked with a museum that was so up-front,” Loll says.

Loll quickly assembled a team of five conservators and scientists. From February to October, the team periodically visited the museum and pulled together their findings. By the time their report was finalized in November 2019, the researchers were unanimous. All 16 fragments appeared to be modern forgeries…….

Well, plagiarism is one of his better known tactics as he’s done it twice before, so…..

On Thursday, Joe Biden slammed President Trump’s response to the coronavirus outbreak while speaking in Wilmington, Del., on Thursday afternoon. “The administration’s failure on testing is colossal and it’s a failure of leadership, planning, and execution,” Biden said. “This virus laid bare the severe shortcomings of the current administration.”

Biden went on to suggest things that should have been done. And if you thought they sounded familiar, you’re right, because immediately after blaming Trump for not doing enough, Biden suggested things that have, in fact, already been done.

Joe Biden said “no efforts should be spared” to get private labs and universities working to rapidly expand testing for coronavirus. Congratulations Joe, President Trump did this weeks ago when he ordered the FDA to allow hundreds of private labs and academic hospitals to rapidly begin testing for coronavirus.

Joe Biden also said that small businesses will need relief from the economic impact of the coronavirus. Congratulations, Joe, Trump literally called for $50 billion in liquidity to small business owners a day prior to Biden’s remarks and has asked Congress for even more relief.

The former vice president also said insurance companies should waive copays for coronavirus testing, which is a good idea. And guess what? Trump already did that, too, as well as getting commitments from providers to expand their coverage include treatment for the coronavirus in their plans.

Think Biden was done ripping off President Trump’s actions and presenting them as his own ideas? Nope. He added that we need to “accelerate” the development of a coronavirus vaccine. Hey, guess what happened in January while Democrats were all focused on impeachment? The Trump administration fast-tracked the development of a vaccine with the goal of clinical trials to begin within months.

Echoing what pretty much all experts have been advising for weeks now, Joe Biden also advised Americans not to go to work if they’re sick, to wash their hands (duh), and to avoid large public gatherings… which Trump advised Americans to do last month.

It takes a lot of gall to blast Trump’s response to the coronavirus and then call for the exact same courses of action Trump has taken and try to pass it off as your own plan. Plagiarism is hardly a new thing for Joe Biden, but this example truly takes the cake. Trump’s decisive actions in response to the outbreak saved lives, but Biden cares more about politicizing the issue and, I suppose, assuming credit for coming up with ideas that Trump already put in place.

This may be because Biden is trying to cover up the fact that he has a lousy record when it comes to public health crises. “In the past, Joe Biden has shown terrible judgment and incompetence in the face of public health issues,” Tim Murtaugh, the communications director for the Trump campaign said in a statement. “The Obama White House had to publicly apologize for and clean up after Biden when his irresponsible remarks caused panic during the swine flu outbreak in 2009. Just weeks ago, he was openly critical of President Trump’s early move to restrict travel from China to the United States in response to the coronavirus – a decision which medical experts agree helped impede the spread of the virus to this country.”

Well, when it’s a tenet of your religion (Pelosi says she’s a Catholic, but she actually must worship Moloch) you do what you can to advance it.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi sought to include a potential way to guarantee federal funding for abortion into the coronavirus economic stimulus plan, according to multiple senior White House officials.

Speaking to the Daily Caller, those officials alleged that while negotiating the stimulus with U.S. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, Pelosi tried to lobby for “several” provisions that stalled bipartisan commitment to the effort. One was a mandate for up to $1 billion to reimburse laboratory claims, which White House officials say would set a precedent of health spending without protections outlined in the Hyde Amendment.

The Hyde Amendmentblocks clinics that perform abortions from receiving federal funding, and Democrats have pushed the Trump administration to end it since he was elected in 2016

“A new mandatory funding stream that does not have Hyde protections would be unprecedented,” one White House official explained. “Under the guise of protecting people, Speaker Pelosi is working to make sure taxpayer dollars are spent covering abortion — which is not only backwards, but goes against historical norms.”

A second White House official referred to the provision as a “slush fund” and yet another questioned “what the Hyde Amendment and abortion have to do with protecting Americans from coronavirus?”

The report’s authors, David Mackie and Jessica Murray, warn that ‘climate change would not only impact GDP and welfare directly but would also have indirect effects via morbidity, mortality, famine, water stress, conflict, and migration.’

“We cannot rule out catastrophic outcomes where human life as we know it is threatened”, they add darkly, urging the immediate introduction of a global carbon tax to avert potential disaster.

Then again, they say, covering their bets, it may do none of those things because climate change is very unpredictable.

Their report has been greeted with undisguised rapture by the leftist media – including the BBC and the Guardian – delighted to have all its prejudices confirmed by an apparently rigorous study produced by a bank which it has previously criticised because of its investments in fossil fuels.

Wiser heads, however, recognise that the report is yet another climatological nothingburger cobbled together from the usual, compromised, dubious alarmist studies by a pair of economists with no special knowledge to bring to the party.

The report is not merely wrong but culpably misleading – the kind of false prospectus which would normally get any financial organisation promoting it into heaps of legal trouble.

Where it particularly falls down is in its reliance on RCP8.5. This is the so-called ‘business as usual’ (BAU) scenario which climate alarmists have for years being using on their computer models to predict potentially catastrophic temperature rises of the kind mentioned in the JP Morgan report.

The problem with RCP8.5 is that as Judith Curry, Roger Pielke Jr and others have pointed out, there is no real world evidence to support its hysterical predictions. On the contrary, as time goes by, the doomsday predictions of the RCP8.5 models look like a risible fantasy of no scientific value whatsoever.

In the absence also of any observably catastrophic global rise in temperature throughout the 21st century (which not even ‘pause-busting’ adjustments to temperature data could conjure up), alarmists have turned to inventing imminent future catastrophes via the invocation of highly speculative ‘tipping points’ which supposedly will be ‘triggered’ at imaginary and entirely ad hoc global warming thresholds (1.5C, 2C, 3C etc. relative to pre-industrial baseline). They have also increasingly employed the highly unrealistic ‘business as usual’ scenario RCP8.5 to supercharge their global warming projections in order to manufacture climate alarmist narratives in the media, a strategy which only in the last couple of months has started to be seriously questioned. Roger Pielke Jr has recently been at the vanguard of the movement to expose the misuse of this nightmarishly unrealistic scenario as ‘business as usual’.

Apart from being alarmist propaganda bilge, the report’s other most dishonest feature is the way that it is being spun as something uncharacteristic of the financial industry.

In fact, the financial sector has long since capitulated to climate alarmism, not least because its dodgier operators – see Al Gore as an early example of this – have recognised the green scam as a route to easy profit.

It is, in fact, probably the single most alarming thing about the great global warming con: that big money is now so heavily involved in promoting it that it may be impossible for honest science or economic and political integrity to win the battle against all the mendacious and cynical vested interests seeking to profit from it (at the expense, of course, of all the little people).

New plans to overthrow market-driven investment systems are a constant feature of today’s global financial scene. The recent appointment of Bank of England Governor Mark Carney as the UN’s special envoy for climate action and finance signals a renewed international effort to turn the world’s energy investors into pawns of state climate activists and agitators for market-distorting policies.

The movement to subvert markets, however, is much bigger than Carney. It is now accepted dogma globally that the financial markets are unreliable, twisted by greed and even corrupt. In Carney’s words, markets are based on “selective information, spin, misdirection.” That’s a mild criticism compared with the views of others. “Capitalism as we know it is dead,” said Salesforce chief Marc Benioff, one of many business leaders who have joined the anti-corporate left in claiming the financial and capital markets are destroying the planet.

In short, there is nothing surprising about JP Morgan throwing its weight behind the $1.5 trillion plus climate industrial complex because this is what all the world’s crony capitalists and rent-seekers are doing right now, so why should JP Morgan miss out on the party?

But the report needs to be taken with a very large pinch of salt. And if there’s anyone who doubts this, I’ve got an amazing deal just for you: a huge bridge, going cheap; and my vast and potentially hugely profitable portfolio of Enron and Solyndra shares.

A study by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health found expanding background checks does nothing to lower the mass shooting rate.

Researchers did claim licensing requirements like those in Connecticut help reduce the number of mass shootings, but their study omitted the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School in which 26 were killed at the school and another victim was killed in a private home.

In other words, a study which claims licensing reduces instances of mass shootings omitted one of the most often cited mass shootings in U.S. history, even though that shooting occurred in a licensing state.

Moreover, John Hopkins’ criteria for licensing laws allowed them to bypass Illinois which, in turn, allowed them to sidestep the never ending gun crime of Chicago.

But the study was clear there is no evidence tying “assault weapons” to a lower incidence of mass shootings.

Firearm Purchaser Licensing Laws Linked to Fewer Fatal Mass Shootings
BANS ON LARGE-CAPACITY MAGAZINES WERE ALSO ASSOCIATED WITH FEWER FATAL MASS SHOOTINGS AND FATALITIES
Firearm purchaser licensing laws that require an in-person application or fingerprinting are associated with an estimated 56 percent fewer fatal mass shootings in states that have them, according to a new study by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

The study analyzed fatal mass shootings in 45 states between 1984 and 2017 and the association between the rates of those shootings and the presence of various firearm laws.

The study was published in a February 2020 special issue on mass violence in the U.S. in the journal Criminology & Public Policy.

The researchers also found evidence that laws banning large-capacity magazines, defined as those that hold more than 10 rounds of ammunition, were associated with significant reductions in the rate of fatal mass shootings with four or more fatalities and the number killed in those shootings. >>>>The size and precision of the estimated effects of LCM bans varied across many statistical analyses presented in study.<<<<

(in other words, our evidence depends on our point of view because the numbers really don’t add up)

“After each horrible mass shooting, there are always policy debates on how they can be prevented,” says lead author Daniel Webster, ScD, MPH, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research and Bloomberg Professor of American Health in Violence Prevention. “One side often calls for expanding background checks to private purchasers, and the other usually calls for fewer restrictions on civilian gun carrying. Our findings indicate that neither of those prescriptions are associated with lower rates of fatal mass shootings. What does appear to work to reduce mass shootings are licensing laws and laws banning large-capacity magazines.”

(But later on down the page they admit that magazine laws have to be ‘controlled for’ – in other words numerically skewed to fit a preconceived idea – …so the above is a lie, right??)

In their analyses, researchers identified 604 mass shootings involving four or more victim fatalities; a total of 2,976 victims were killed in these incidents. Approximately 28 percent (842) of victim fatalities were from domestic-related shootings, 61 percent (2,057) were from non-domestic related shootings, and it was unclear among the remaining 11 percent (77) of victims whether the shooting was domestic-related. Most mass shootings had four to six victim fatalities.

As for licensing, federal law requires licensed firearm dealers—but not private sellers—to initiate a background check before the purchase of a gun. Firearm purchaser licensing laws require even more: a direct application to a law enforcement agency that conducts background checks, often aided by fingerprint-based identity verification of the applicant. Under such laws, a license or permit to purchase is needed for sales by private individuals as well as licensed firearm dealers. Nine states—Connecticut, Hawaii, Illinois, Iowa, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina—and the District of Columbia currently have some form of firearm purchaser or owner licensing laws.

Previous research shows that firearm purchaser licensing laws are associated with reductions in rates of firearm homicides and suicides.

(Did they conveniently forget Chicago?)

For the study, the researchers analyzed data from the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Supplementary Homicide Reports, a database of homicide records voluntarily reported to the FBI by local law enforcement agencies, from 1984 to 2017. Data for Florida, Kansas, Kentucky, Nebraska, and Montana were excluded due to significant gaps in reporting.

(What are these ‘significant gaps’? Is it that the stats from these states don’t jibe with the anticipated outcome…hmm?)

The Supplementary Homicide Reports collects information on the number of victims, weapon(s) used, circumstances or motive, and the relationship between the offender and the first victim. Shootings connected to gang or illegal drug-related activities were excluded from the analyses.

Due to voluntary reporting policies, the FBI’s database did not include several high-profile mass shootings, including the 2012 Newtown, Connecticut, school shooting, 2012 Aurora, Colorado, movie theater shooting, and the 2017 Sutherland Springs, Texas, church shooting. The researchers addressed these gaps by using data from Stanford University’s Stanford Mass Shootings in America database and the Gun Violence Archive to identify 33 additional fatal mass shootings.

In their study, the researchers made a comprehensive list of all the mass shootings between 1984 and 2017 and categorized the events based on whether the shooter had a domestic relationship (family or intimate partner) to one of the victims. The researchers’ analyses estimated the independent association between annual rates of fatal mass shootings in states and the presence of various state and federal gun laws, while controlling for differences in demographics, social and economic conditions, alcohol consumption, deaths from drug overdoses, and national trends in fatal mass shootings.

Types of firearm laws examined in the study included regulation of civilian concealed carry; extensions of background check requirements at the point of sale for private transfers; prohibitions for non-felony violence, including restraining orders for domestic violence; assault weapon bans; and large-capacity magazine bans.

The study also examined purchaser licensing laws that required in-person application to a law enforcement agency or other fingerprint-based identification of applicants, regardless of whether the sale was by a licensed gun dealer or a private seller. Seven states—Connecticut, Hawaii, Iowa, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York—and the District of Columbia currently meet that criteria and were analyzed in the study. Three additional states—Missouri, Michigan, and Nebraska—were also included in the analyses based on their purchaser licensing laws; during the study period, these states repealed all or part of their licensing requirements.

The study did not find significant associations between the incidence of fatal mass shootings and concealed carry laws, comprehensive background check laws without licensing requirements, or firearm prohibitions for violent misdemeanor convictions and domestic violence restraining orders. Although researchers did not find a clear association between firearm restrictions for domestic abusers and reduced fatal mass shootings, other research has shown these laws do reduce intimate partner homicides.

In addition, the study did not find an independent association between assault weapon bans and the incidence of fatal mass shootings after controlling for the effects of bans on large-capacity magazines.

“Evidence Concerning the Regulation of Firearms Design, Sale, and Carrying on Fatal Mass Shootings in the United States” was written by Daniel W. Webster, Alexander McCourt, Cassandra K. Crifasi, Marisa D. Booty, and Elizabeth A. Stuart.

The study was supported by The Joyce Foundation and Dr. Webster’s professorship funded by the Bloomberg American Health Initiative.

(The Joyce Foundation…That right there is the tip off. TJF is and always has been one of the more rabid anti-gun/anti-self defense entities in the U.S. Just another scrap piece of proselytizing from the controllers.)

Democratic presidential candidate Mike Bloomberg’s $10 million 2020 Super Bowl ad includes a misleading statistic concerning the number of children killed in violent gun-related crimes, and inaccurately suggests that an adult victim of gun crime in Texas was a child, Fox News has found.

In the raw and emotional one-minute spot, Calandrian Simpson Kemp recalls her son’s death: “On a Friday morning, George was shot. George didn’t survive. I just kept saying, ‘You cannot tell me that the child that I gave birth to, is no longer here.’ Lives are being lost every day. It is a national crisis.”

A statistic immediately appears on the screen: “2,900 CHILDREN DIE FROM GUN VIOLENCE EVERY YEAR.” The number is not attributed to any source.

However, a recent report from the Bloomberg-founded group Everytown for Gun Safety came up with that same number — but only when it included teenagers ages 18 and 19 in the calculation. Bloomberg’s advertisement makes no mention of older teenagers and suggests that the statistic is referring to younger children only. Washington Free Beacon reporter Stephen Gutowski found that once adults were removed from the calculation, the number dropped by nearly half.

Additionally, court documents from a Texas state appellate court reviewed by Fox News show that the victim referenced in the advertisement, George Kemp, was 20 years old at the time of his death.

FORT COLLINS, Colo. — A perjury charge has been filed against Susan Holmes, the woman who recently tried to use Colorado’s new “red flag” law to have a Colorado State University officer’s weapons confiscated.

Everyone was saying he was running just because he’s a narcissistic ass, but figuring it’s personal since they’re both NooYawk billionaires and he hates Trump’s guts is more reasonable. And just because he is a billionaire and apparently doesn’t mind spending a billion here and a billion there doesn’t mean if he can figure out a good deal, he won’t use it.

There is very good reason to believe Michael Bloomberg isn’t actually running for president.

Of course, there is plenty of evidence to the contrary. For one, he declared he is. He’s also hired more than 1,000 staff and is still expanding, offering salaries far above campaign averages. This week, he became the first of the declared candidates to have campaigned in all 14 states of March 3’s Super Tuesday primary battle, and he’s spent a quarter billion on political advertising so far. All would point toward Bloomberg indeed running for president.

But here’s the snag: He wanted to do all of this anyway. Everything, that is, but the declaration bit. That, he was loathe to do. But the staff, the ad spending, the campaigning — he was going to do all of this to defeat President Donald Trump already, and we know this because he told us so.

As early as February 2019, the billionaire pledged he’d spend at least $500 million to defeat the president as either a candidate or as what Politico called “a shadow political party for the Democratic nominee.” That massive spend, the report continued, represents “just 1 percent of Bloomberg’s estimated net worth.”

Just a month later, the wealthy New Yorker laughed at the idea he would ever run for president, mocking “Amtrak Joe” Biden for apologizing “for being male, over 50 [and] white,” and Beh-tóh O’Rourke, who Bloomberg joked had “apologized for being born.” Well, a few months later he jumped in anyway. But does the world-renowned winner have any intention of actually winning the nomination?

We might all agree it is strange to hear the hyper-competitive Bloomberg declare he will pay his sizable staff to work on behalf of the people who are supposed to be his primary opponents. His “army of some 500 staffers will march on through the general election in November even if he loses the Democratic nomination, campaign officials [told] NBC News” back when he employed a measly 500 staffers.

Of course, Bloomberg has said the same of the now $2 billion he’s reportedly willing to spend for any campaign to defeat Trump.

This magnanimity in defeat doesn’t seem to square with Michael Bloomberg, cut-throat capitalist billionaire, but it does make sense when viewed in the light of his Bloomberg News empire, which loses money every year. The losses don’t seem to bother Bloomberg, because in this aspect of business he is a man who wants his ideas in the world and is willing to pay to make it happen.

So why declare? Simply put, the billionaire mayor gets a lot more for his money as a candidate than he ever could as a donor or even as the operator of a super PAC.

First, there are limits to what a donor can give a campaign, and $2 billion is way out of the question. Even so, Bloomberg could pour billions into an organization to sway elections, as Charles Koch and George Soros seek to do. Then, there’s something campaigns have that no PAC has — and that’s access to the best rates the market has to offer.

See, super PACs pay more for everything. And not a little more: Depending on the spend, these outfits pay maybe double what a candidate for office must pay for advertisements in digital, radio, cable, newspapers, network television, and even mail.

By law, candidates for office are entitled to the best treatment a station can give. “In the 45 days before a primary and the 60 days before a general election,” Radio & Television Business Report explains, “legally qualified candidates get the lowest rate for a spot that is then running on the station within any class of advertising time and particular daypart.”

If a private entity earned a bonus spot, the ability for his ads to preempt other ads, or any other perks, those must also be made available to the person running for office. Someone is getting a deal for buying in bulk? Then so is the candidate, even if the campaign isn’t buying in bulk. And on and on.

Dr. Joseph Sakran panicked after hundreds of Twitter users exposed his hate hoax this week so he deleted his fake ‘death threat’ tweets then made up a bizarre story claiming the Fairfax police told him to delete his tweets.

It was all a lie.

A Lieutenant at Fairfax PD verified to The Post Millennial that Dr. Sakran never filed a police report nor did the Fairfax PD ask him to delete his tweet!

MORE UPDATES:

Sakran is now claiming Police *asked him* to delete the tweet.

A Lieutenant at Fairfax PD, Sakran’s local police, has verified for @TPostMillennial that Sakran did not file a police report, nor did Fairfax PD ask him to delete his tweet.https://t.co/GzIJ89gRwQ

The tweets have been deleted, and no, the Fairfax police never asked him to delete his tweets.

The truth is Dr. Sakran cooked up the hoax and after hundreds of Twitter users descended on his account and pointed out the flaws in his fable, he panicked and made up another lie to try to cover up his hoax.

Dr. Sakran is a radical anti-gun activist who works with the most dangerous anti-2nd Amendment groups on Capitol Hill in order to disarm American citizens.

Every year, Rachel Bronson, President and CEO of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, who has a degree in political science from Columbia, gets up in front of a fake clock to announce that the world is doomed.

Bronson is not an atomic scientist. Or any kind of scientist. Unless you believe politics is a science. And if politics is a science, then Bronson is the Lysenko of the field, predicting doom out of bias and ignorance.

This year, the Doomsday Clock had its hands set forward to 100 seconds to midnight. After setting the clock at 2 minutes to midnight in honor of President Trump two years ago, it’s all out of minutes.

Now it’s down to seconds. At this rate the fake clock will soon be down to negative numbers.

If you don’t believe Rachel, maybe you’ll listen to Jerry Brown, former California governor and executive chair of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Jerry is not an atomic scientist, but he did nuke California.

According to Jerry, “If there’s ever a time to wake up, it’s now.”

But Jerry doesn’t want people waking up. He wants them to go back to sleep. And stay that way.

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, led by atomic scientists like Rachel and Jerry, demand that, “the international community should begin multilateral discussions aimed at establishing norms of behavior, both domestic and international, that discourage and penalize the misuse of science.”

Like people claiming to be atomic scientists when they’re actually political hacks?

The Bulletin had been set up by lefties who were actual scientists to warn of a nuclear war. But, no matter what Rachel does with her big clock, a nuclear war is less likely than ever. So, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which is short on atoms, scientists and apocalypses, threw in global warming.

But global warming isn’t enough. The Doomsday Clock is at 100 seconds to midnight because of the threat of nuclear war and global warming, also fake news, deepfakes, AI, the internet, the Space Force, and mainly President Donald J. Trump. We’ve gone from nuclear scientists warning of nuclear war to political scientists warning that “national leaders have increasingly dismissed information with which they do not agree as fake news.” I wonder whom the Bulletin of the Political Scientists could mean.

“Leaders intent on blurring the line between fact and politically motivated fantasy—are a profound threat to effective democracies,” the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists warns.

That’s ironic because the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is a politically motivated fantasy…………

released a new report claiming 2019 was “the second warmest [year] since modern recordkeeping began in 1880. NOAA says this past year was 0.98 degrees Celsius warmer than the 1951 to 1980 mean, making the 2010s “clearly the warmest decade on record.”

Climate experts at The Heartland Institute dispute this claim, pointing to a cherry-picked period for the “mean” comparison and data that has been consistently adjusted to artificially make recent years appear significantly warmer than in decades past. In fact, NOAA’s state-of-the-art land-based temperature stations in the United States, placed by design to minimize the urban heat-island effect and other factors that corrupt the data, show that the U.S. was cooler in 2019 than in 2005. See the chart below from the U.S. Climate Reference Network via the NOAA website.

The following statements from climate and environment experts at The Heartland Institute—a free-market think tank—may be used for attribution. For more comments, refer to the contact information below. To book a Heartland guest on your program, please contact Media Specialist Billy Aouste at media@heartland.org.“The NOAA/NASA press release is inconsistently presented. For example, they can’t even agree on a common base period for comparisons. Some graphs use 1951-1980 while others compare to 1981-2010 averages to create anomaly plots. NOAA and NASA owe it to the public to present climate data with a consistent climate period for comparison, otherwise it’s just sloppy science.

“NOAA’s U.S. Climate Reference Network (USCRN) has the best quality climate data on the planet, yet it never gets mentioned in their press releases. While the U.S. isn’t the world, the lack of a warming signal in the contiguous United States since 2005 suggests that the data NOAA and NASA use from the antiquated Global Historical Climate Network (GHCN) reflects warmer biases due to urbanization and adjustments to the data. The USCRN has no biases, and no need for adjustments, and in my opinion represents a ground truth for climate change.”

“Modest warming has, thankfully, been occurring since we slipped out of the Little Ice Age a little more than a century ago. That was the coldest period of the past 10,000 years and brought horrible human misery. The modest warming that is lately occurring should naturally lead to subsequent years being a little warmer than previous years, which is the case. This is a good thing and just brought tremendous human health and welfare benefits, along with substantial environmental benefits.”

“Once again, NASA and NOAA are throwing gasoline on a fire they largely created by ignoring the best data on temperature, and instead using compromised or adjusted temperature readings to reinforce their claim humans are causing a climate crisis. The U.S. Climate Reference Network (USCRN), the gold standard of surface temperature data, plus data from global satellites and weather balloons, all record minimal or almost no warming over the past 40 years, yet NASA and NOAA ignore these sources of unbiased data, because it undermines their dogmatic belief in human caused climate catastrophe.”

“NASA and NOAA are like toddlers trying to fit round toys into square holes, and just as likely as toddlers to throw fits when their efforts are stymied by reality.”